


Globetrotter

by feralphoenix



Category: Bakemonogatari
Genre: Child Abuse, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-04
Updated: 2013-08-04
Packaged: 2017-12-22 10:39:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/912224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On living to the next day and the next.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Globetrotter

**Author's Note:**

> _(I write it out in verse_ – i am not a thing i am not a thing)

It helps, to have a door to lock, to have a place to go so that she won’t be underfoot. It helps, too, to know that in her heart of hearts she is not alone.

She has forced herself to be good, to hide away and pretend to the world that nothing’s wrong, for too long to fully break her own conditioning. She already plotted her own escape, and she is already trundling along the rails she built. So she can’t pack up her bags early and leave. She can’t go running to Araragi-kun or Senjougahara-san and fall to her knees and beg for help, for a place to stay until the end of the school year. _“I want to leave forever”_ can build up in her lungs like air swelling in a bellows, but it can’t make it out of her throat. _“Give me my own room”_ was her utmost.

She is regularly reduced to a tight ball of arms and legs and hitching breath. She thinks about dying. She thinks about hurting other people and she thinks about hurting herself. She can’t tell herself that those impulses aren’t really her anymore. She has promised that much, and besides, it is dangerous. There is a world of hatred inside her, a world of pain, aimless and destructive and almost too much for one girl to hold.

She wonders—how other people who feel like this handle it. If they’re just folded into the reams of suicide statistics, or if there are countless people like her and like Senjougahara-san in the world, who push their feelings away in order to survive.

But the heart that wants to kill her parents who are not her parents is hers. The heart that wants to do horrible things in the name of feeling better is hers. The heart that wants to steal Araragi-kun away is hers. The heart that hates the world that is ignorant to her suffering, enough to burn it down, is hers.

She does not intend to repeat her parents’ sins, and force those feelings onto an endless chain of little sisters in her place.

With so much history, she cannot trust her own self-judgment: But she knows that if it becomes too much, she _could_ ask her friends for a place to stay. She _could_ ask the monsters in her heart to give her power. She has honestly asked for help once in her life: It should not be as difficult the second time.

It isn’t impossible. She still thinks that she _mustn’t,_ and still thinks that she _won’t,_ but she knows that she _can._

There is fire and there is hunger written deep into her bones. There is one shining memory of a kind hand on her head, of a boy she admired finally coming to stand at her side when she needed a leg up. She dyes her roots black every morning because she is powerful, she is abnormal. These things she holds tight to, like talismans, when her head is ringing from blows from the same hard hands that hammer at her door. She is not powerless. This will not last forever.

(She will not lie to herself and say that acknowledging her feelings—that acknowledging that _what is happening to her is abuse_ —that having the boy she loves properly be her hero just the once is enough. It is not enough. The best it can be is enough for now.)

 

 

And when she graduates she will pack up all of her things into a suitcase and fly away on an airplane with her passport tightly in hand.

She will spend afternoons walking the streets in Lithuania, sleep late in a hotel room in Switzerland, take endless pictures of sunflowers in the United States of America and get rained on in Wales. In England she will be accosted by a man and nearly kill him with Black Hanekawa’s energy drain. In Russia she will get lost and light a signal fire for herself with Kako’s fire.

In Italy she will collapse hyperventilating in broad daylight at the sound of a butcher pummeling his meat, and she will be brought home by a concerned young couple, saved by a kindness that comes only from common decency. She will want to cry from gratitude, and she will want to hurt something from jealousy at their unblemished goodness, and she will be uncomfortable not because her Italian is imperfect but because she is so horribly out of her depth, being cared for, being loved.

She will walk all over the world, not sightseeing, nor searching for anyone: Just another stranger in the crowd. She will be lonely, a very different kind of loneliness than what she has experienced as a third wheel/abnormal existence/perfect student at Naoetsu High School.

It will not be easy. It will not cure her. But it will give her distance. It will give her perspective, just a little.

She will ruin her first application form for NGO work by spilling jam on it over breakfast. She will ruin her second form by accidentally tearing it when something—a taste, a smell, a snatch of song, she doesn’t know—makes her think of the house in Japan and blood running down her face.

She will turn in her third application without incident. It will be accepted without incident.

She will take a few selfies with her phone camera—a short-haired girl with white showing at her roots in stripes, a short-haired girl wearing the first plain clothes she has ever bought all for herself—and email the news to the people who matter, smartphone clutched tightly in her fist, raised to the heavens like a radio tower.

 

 

She will continue to survive. It is, after all, what those of the feline persuasion are best at.


End file.
